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On first glancing at the title of Joseph Newirth's paper, “On Not Interpreting: The Metaphor of the Baby, Enactment, and Transitional Experience,” I felt provoked by the unsettling notion of not interpreting as at all possible. Not interpreting in psychoanalysis for me is akin to not breathing. Second, I was put off by what seemed to me to be a jangle of uncoordinated signifiers—metaphor of the baby, enactment, and transitional experience. But after reading the paper, I became a believer—not in all that Newirth offers or in his conclusions, but in the thumpingly good value of his undertaking, in the scholarliness and clinical sensitivity his paper displays.
Newirth regards the paradigmatic shift to relationalism in psychoanalysis as premature, as collapsing important differences among theoretical positions. He likens the developmental models offered up by each theoretical perspective to allegories and schemata that organize how clinicians of one school or another will think about the analyst-patient relationship. He disputes what he regards as Mitchell's rhetorical strategy of wrongheaded I literalness, reducing the concept of arrested development to mere parody. Mitchell and others miss the point, he believes. What is often arrested, says Newirth, is the capacity for symbolic experience. Caught in a world that is concrete, fragile, and volatile—qualities that may also describe the patient's sense of self—the patient elaborates a Winnicottian false self or, if you prefer, an amalgam of Kohutian archaic selfobject transferences, or yet again, may be seen as becoming fixed in the Lacanian Real and unable to gain entry to the Symbolic Order. Spero (1995) refers to the capacity to symbolize as symbolification, a kind of formatting of psychic space on which symbols may then be inscribed. Threading together Winnicottian and Lacanian perspectives, Spero affirms a position I think is congenial to Newirth's.